The Silk Road: A New History (44 page)

Curiously, Marco Polo was an exception. He claimed to have taken the southern Silk Road route through Khotan, and no one knows why he did not take the more traveled grasslands route. Marco left Venice in 1271 at the age of seventeen, traveling with two uncles. The Mongol Empire had broken into four sectors only ten years earlier. Each sector was ruled by one of Chinggis’s sons. The Chaghatai Khanate stretched all the way from Turfan in the east to Bukhara in the west and included the territory of modern Xinjiang. In the company of his uncles, Polo visited Yarkand and Khotan, both in the Chaghatai Khanate, on his way to China:

Let us turn next to the province of Yarkand, five days’ journey in extent. The inhabitants follow the law of Muhammad, and there are also some Nestorian Christians. They are subject to the Great Khan’s nephew, of whom I have already spoken. It is amply stocked with the means of life, especially cotton. But since there is nothing here worth mentioning in our book, we shall pass on to Khotan, which lies towards the east-north-east.

Khotan is a province eight day’s journey in extent, which is subject to the Great Khan. The inhabitants all worship Muhammad. It has cities and towns in plenty, of which the most splendid, and the capital of the kingdom, bears the same name as the province, Khotan. It is amply stocked with the means of life. Cotton grows here in plenty. It has vineyards, estates, and orchards in plenty. The people live by trade and industry; they are not at all war-like.
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These descriptions of Yarkand and Khotan typify Polo’s narrative. Repetitive, and startlingly short of persuasive detail, they hardly read like an eyewitness account. Polo then describes a place called Pem, not yet identified by scholars. The entry repeats much of the same information as that for Khotan, with one significant addition about jade:

Passing on from here, we come to the province of Pem, five days’ journey in extent, towards the east-north-east. Here too the inhabitants worship Muhammad and are subject to the Great Khan. It has villages and towns in plenty. The most splendid city and the capital of the province is called Pem. There are rivers here in which are found stones called jasper and chalcedony in plenty. There is no lack of the means of life. Cotton is plentiful. The inhabitants live by trade and industry.

It certainly seems as though Polo’s information is incorrect: the information he gives for Pem all fits Khotan. But his Pem could be Phema, an ancient name for Keriya, the oasis between Khotan and Niya.
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Polo’s description of Pem continues:

The following custom is prevalent among them. When a woman’s husband leaves her to go on a journey of more than twenty days, then, as soon as he has left, she takes another husband.

Historians have debated the veracity of Polo’s account for centuries; generally speaking, historians of China have more reservations about Polo, perhaps because they have access to so many other sources, than do historians of the Mongols, who heatedly argue for the reliability of Polo’s account on the basis of his insider knowledge of Yuan-dynasty court politics.
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Everyone concurs that medieval travel accounts often contain descriptions of places—like Khotan and Pem—that their authors never actually visited. Medieval readers did not expect Polo to have direct knowledge of each place he mentioned.

Merchants, like Polo and his uncles, provided a crucial service for the Mongols. Because they were businessmen, they knew how to convert the vast holdings of gold, silver, and other plundered goods taken in battle, and find creative ways to exchange these assets for things the Mongols really wanted, like textiles. The Mongols lent vast sums of silver to groups of merchants with whom they formed partnerships; the merchants used this money to purchase wares. These merchants were predominantly Central Asian Muslims but also included Syrians, Armenians, and Jews. Polo and his uncles may have entered into a similar implicit partnership agreement.
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These partnerships were new and unlike anything during earlier Chinese dynasties.

In the 1300s the Mongol Empire began to unravel, with the different sectors becoming independent of each other. Although the Yuan-dynasty emperors in China did not convert to Islam, the rulers of the three other sectors, including the Chagatai Khanate, did. In the early 1330s the first Muslim ruler of the Chagatai Khanate took the throne, and he encouraged his soldiers to convert to Islam. His subjects already included some Muslims; these measures increased their numbers.
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The influence of Islam increased in Central Asia during the reign of Timur the Lame (Tamerlane, reigned 1370–1405), who was also a Muslim. In the late 1300s the descendents of the Chagatai Khanate rulers gained control of much of Xinjiang, while a native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, succeeded in pushing the Mongols out of central China back to their homeland in Mongolia. In the following centuries, the oases of modern Xinjiang continued to send tribute missions to the Ming court at Beijing. As late as 1400 Buddhism was still flourishing in Turfan, according to accounts from envoys.
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In 1602 one European, Bento de Goes, a Jesuit born in the Azores, grew a beard and allowed his hair to grow long. Disguised as a Persian merchant, he traveled all the way from India to China.
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He adopted the name Abdullah Isai. Abdullah means “servant of God” in Arabic, while Isai is a Spanish version of the Arabic name Isa (Jesus). At his first stop, Kabul, he met the mother of the king of Khotan (also the sister of the king of Yarkand) who had been robbed and needed funds. De Goes sold some of his goods so that he could lend her six hundred pieces of gold interest free, and she promised to pay him back with Khotanese jade. The route west over the Pamirs to Yarkand was so fraught with danger that his caravan of five hundred men hired four hundred guards to protect them.

After arriving safely in Yarkand, de Goes proceeded to Khotan, where he was able to collect the jade due to him. Then he had to wait in Yarkand a full year for a caravan to Beijing. Caravans were hard to organize. In this case, the Chinese stipulated that the caravan could have only seventy-two merchants. The ruler of Yarkand sold the position of caravan leader to the highest bidder, who paid two hundred sacks of musk for the position, and the other seventy-one positions in the caravan went for less. When every spot was finally filled, the caravan set off along the northern route around the Taklamakan in the fall of 1604.

De Goes left the main caravan and visited Turfan, Hami, and Jiayuguan with two companions. Given permission to enter China, he arrived at Suzhou (modern Jiuquan in Gansu) on Christmas 1605. There he sent a letter to Matteo Ricci, who had been in Beijing since 1601, who dispatched a Christian convert to visit de Goes. On arrival, he confirmed what de Goes suspected: that the Cathay mentioned by earlier travelers was the same place as China. Eleven days after the disciple reached him, de Goes died in 1607.

De Goes’s travel partners divided his property and apparently shredded his diary, leaving only a few sections which fellow Jesuits managed to salvage and send to Ricci. His account of the tribute trade is the most detailed that survives for the modern period. Few caravans traveled from Central Asia to China; those that did maintained the pretense that they were presenting tribute to the Ming emperor. Caravans at this time sought strength in numbers.

As few caravans entered Xinjiang during the 1600 and 1700s, hardly any travelers left the region during these centuries. A handful of Muslims based in Xinjiang and Gansu traveled to the Middle East, often to study with Sufi teachers; some of them performed the hajj and went to Mecca as well. In the 1600s a Sufi teacher from west of the Pamirs crossed into southern Xinjiang and Gansu, where he preached with great success. His son Khoja Afaq, born in Hami, continued his teaching and became extremely well known. In the 1700s his successors traveled to Yemen, where they studied with Naqshabandi teachers. On their return, they were unusually influential. They spoke with great authority, because so few Muslims had the chance to study outside of Xinjiang.
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In time, the descendants of these Sufis became the Khoja rulers of Khotan and Yarkand, where they implemented Islamic law and their subjects prayed at mosques and abstained from eating pork. Under their influence, Xinjiang became fully Islamicized.

In 1759 the Manchu armies of the Qing dynasty defeated their last rival and gained control of the Western Regions.
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The Qing government created the province of Xinjiang, which means “new territory.” Delegating power to local headmen, Manchu officials used the Arabic alphabet to translate imperial edicts into Uighur. People living in Xinjiang were subject to different laws than those living in central China: while the Manchus required their Chinese subjects to shave their foreheads and tie their hair into queues, Muslims in Xinjiang were permitted to keep their own hairstyles. Only high-ranking Muslims could apply to the government for permission to wear the queue, which they associated with success.
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During the period of Qing control the economy improved. As in the Tang, there was a massive infusion of cash and textiles to support the army, trade links were revitalized, and merchants began to risk travel on longer trade routes. But in 1864 the Qing lost control of Xinjiang, when the province revolted, and in 1865 a strongman named Ya‘qub Beg gained control of the region. Sensing an opportunity to gain a foothold, both Russia and Britain sent trade missions to Ya‘qub Beg’s realm, and their reports are remarkably optimistic. Although most of the goods for sale in markets were locally made, the British and Russian agents described a large potential market for foreign goods, particularly textiles and tea (which no longer came in from China). After Ya‘qub Beg’s death in 1877 the Chinese regained tenuous control.
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In the early 1900s, when Aurel Stein and other foreigners entered Xinjiang with travel documents issued by the Qing, they met many Chinese officials, some of whom actively helped them to excavate and remove antiquities from the region. With the revolution of 1911 and the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Xinjiang enjoyed de facto independence while remaining under control of Chinese warlords who paid lip service to Republican China. In the 1920s and 1930s Russia exerted influence over the various strongmen in power, and Northern Xinjiang was in effect a Soviet satellite under Turkic local leadership from 1945 to 1949. Except for rebellions in the early 1930s, southern Xinjiang, the region treated in this book, was under Chinese warlord rule until one leader recognized the rule of the Nationalists in 1944. In 1949 the warlord then in control shifted his allegiance from the Nationalists to the Chinese Communist Party, and Xinjiang joined the People’s Republic of China.

Since 1949, Xinjiang’s history has in many ways followed that of all of China. The early 1950s were relatively relaxed. The Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958 began a long period of collectivism, with limited freedom to practice religion. In 1976 the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Under Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party granted more economic and religious freedoms to Chinese citizens, including those living in Xinjiang. After nearly three decades of economic growth there are still tensions between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese population—and occasional outbreaks of violence like those in the summers of 2009 and 2011. All of the interior regions, including Xinjiang, lag behind the booming coastal regions.

Khotan certainly feels less Chinese than other cities in Xinjiang. Few Chinese faces appear in a population that is 98 percent Uighur. Almost all of Khotan’s taxi drivers and tour guides are native speakers of Uighur, the Turkic language introduced to the region in the ninth and tenth centuries that completely displaced the Khotanese language.

The memory of the Karakhanid conquest is still alive in today’s Xinjiang, where modern Muslims gather at
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shrines. While Islam does not have canonized saints, Muslims early on came to accept that certain individuals have an intimate relationship with God and may intercede with him on behalf of ordinary people.
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At mazars, pilgrims read the Quran, offer sacrifices, and perform rituals. They also pray for healthy children, recovery from illness, or the well-being of their family members. One of the largest, and most visited, mazars is the tomb of Satuq Bughra Khan, the first Karakhanid ruler to convert to Islam. It is located less than an hour’s drive from Kashgar in Atush (see color plate 16A).
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Another important mazar, some two hours from Yengisar, the Ordam Padishah Mazar, is believed to be the tomb of his grandson.
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Most likely it was built in the 1500s by a Sufi teacher.
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Even today, not everyone who would like to is able to go on the hajj: of the 12,700 pilgrims given permission in 2009 to travel to Mecca from China (out of a population of some twenty million Muslims), six hundred were from Khotan.
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Those who cannot go on the hajj sometimes visit local mazars in a fixed sequence that takes the better part of a calendar year. The two best-known series are in Khotan and Kashgar, where mazars are dedicated to the lexicographer Mahmud of Kashgar, the Khoja rulers of Xinjiang, and their female relatives. Those participating in these observances sometimes refer to Khotan as the “holy land,” a fitting name for the oasis given how early it adopted Islam.